Battlegrounds Mobile India Maker Krafton's $5-Billion IPO Said to Be Delayed

South Korean game developer Krafton said on Monday it will resubmit an application for a $5 billion (roughly Rs. 37,100 crores) domestic listing after the financial regulator raised some questions on the application, which sources said would delay its listing.

“Krafton plans to revise our IPO registration statement in response to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS)’s request,” the company told Reuters in a text message.

The delay of the initial public offering (IPO), set to be South Korea’s biggest ever, could be for up to a fortnight as a result of the regulatory review, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The developer of smash hit game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was due to list on the Korean stock exchange in mid-July.

The regulator was reviewing the company’s listing documents but had not identified any major issue, one of the people said.

In its message, Krafton declined to comment on the IPO’s delay.

The two sources could not be named as the information was not yet made public.

Krafton said in a regulatory filing on Friday that the FSS requested the company to resubmit the IPO registration statement because it considered the company’s filing to have fallen into one of three possible categories: not have had a proper format; contained false information or an omission of important facts; or included unclear statements that might undermine investors’ reasonable judgment or lead to serious misunderstanding.

If the company does not submit the revised registration statement within three months, the previously submitted statement will be considered withdrawn, according to local regulations.

Krafton had been pressing on its with IPO, meeting investors over the past fortnight and was due to hold more briefings this week before the deal was delayed, one of the people said.

Krafton said in a regulatory filing on June 16 it expected to offer 10 million shares, or 7 million new shares and 3 million existing shares, at an indicative range of SKW 458,000 (roughly Rs. 30,000) – SKW 557,000 (roughly Rs. 36,550) per share.

The IPO would have valued the company at about $30.9 billion (roughly Rs. 2,29,260 crores).

At $5 billion (roughly Rs. 37,100 crores) -plus, Krafton would become the biggest IPO in South Korea since the SKW 4.9 trillion (roughly Rs. 32,160 crores) float of Samsung Life Insurance in 2010, exchange data shows.

Krafton’s second largest shareholder is Tencent, which owns 15.35 percent of the company through an investment vehicle, according to the IPO filings.

© Thomson Reuters 2021